Clarence Clemons Dies from Complications of Stroke

Posted: June 18, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , | 8 Comments

From The New York Times:

Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, whose jovial onstage manner, soul-rooted style and brotherly relationship with Mr. Springsteen made him one of rock’s most beloved sidemen, died Saturday at a hospital in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 69.

The cause was complications from a stroke, which he suffered last Sunday, said a spokeswoman for Mr. Springsteen….

Clarence Anicholas Clemons was born on Jan. 11, 1942, in Norfolk, Va. His father owned a fish market and his grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher, and although he grew up surrounded by gospel music, the young Mr. Clemons was captivated by rock ’n’ roll. He was given an alto saxophone at age 9 as a Christmas gift; later, following the influence of King Curtis — whose many credits include the jaunty sax part on the Coasters’ 1958 hit “Yakety Yak” — he switched to the tenor.

“I grew up with a very religious background,” he once said in an interview. “I got into the soul music, but I wanted to rock. I was a rocker. I was a born rock ’n’ roll sax player.”

Mr. Clemons was also a gifted athlete, and he attended Maryland State College (now the University of Maryland Eastern Shore) on a scholarship for football and music. He tried out for the Dallas Cowboys and the Cleveland Browns, but a knee injury ended his hopes for a football career.

Rolling Stone summarizes the apocryphal story of the night Clemons and Springsteen met and began to play music together.

So much has been said and written about the stormy night in Asbury Park in 1971 when Clemons met Springsteen that it’s hard to separate fact from myth. At the time, Springsteen was a struggling musician playing the New Jersey bar circuit and Clemons was a former college football player who spent his nights playing sax in clubs along the shore. “It was raining and thundering like a motherfucker,” Clemons wrote in his memoir. “When I opened the door it blew off the hinges and flew down the street . . . Somebody introduced me to Bruce, everybody knew everybody, and he asked me if I wanted to sit in.”

Clemons soon became part of Springsteen’s backing band (not yet known as the E Street Band), and when Bruce recorded his debut LP Greetings From Asbury Park in the summer of 1972, Clemons was brought in for the sessions. Over the next two decades, Clemons became the most recognizable member of the E Street Band – for his massive size, equally huge personality and his onstage role as Springsteen’s foil.

May Clemons continue to make music and tell tall tales in Rock’n’Roll Heaven.

“If this is transparency, who needs it?”

Posted: June 14, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 7 Comments

“If this is transparency, who needs it?” Steven Aftergood, Director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, speaking of the Obama Administration’s White House visitor log policy, the results of which he labeled “very thin gruel” (Apr. 13, 2011).

“A White House official conceded the system has limitations, asserting it was designed not as an archive but ‘first and foremost to protect the first family, second family and White House staff while imposing the smallest administrative burden possible.'” POLITICO, “White House Visitor Logs Leave Out Many” (Apr. 15, 2011).

from the site “Quotes of the Month” hosted by American University’s Washington College of Law, Collaboration of Government secrecy.

One of the major Obama campaign promises was to bring more transparency to governing. The English/international version of   Speigel on line has a compelling series up this week called “Disingenuous Transparency”focusing on how government whistle blowers have suffered under the Obama administration.  The series is extremely relevant given that the U.S. government has finally “officially” released the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War as a show of ‘openness’. The article accuses Obama and the administration of stonewalling and basically ignoring court instructions.  The sad thing is that the compelling article filled with compelling examples will probably never reach a large audience.

I have been following the case of Thomas Drake–a former employee of NSA–who is accused of providing the Baltimore Sun with internal information on government wiretapping. Drake’s case predates the more famous case of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks.  There have been other cases.

In May 2010, a court convicted former FBI interpreter Shamai Leibowitz was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing government information to a blogger.  Another prosecuted whistle blower of Stephen Kim who was  a North Korea expert at the State Department.  Kim supposedly supplied state secrets to Fox News. Another high profile case is that of former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling who allegedly provided information to author James Risen a 2006 exposé entitled  “State of War.”    The Obama Justice Department has prosecuted these cases to the fullest extent possible.

The Drake case fell apart in a similar way that the charges of Oliver North fell apart during the Iran-Contra Scandal of the 1980s.  It was felt that the prosecution of Drake would expose too much national security information. Drake accepted a plea of misdemeanor charges for “exceeding his authorized use of a government computer”.  Again, the tie back to Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is relevant.

But the government withdrew the evidence supporting several of the central charges after a judge ruled Drake would not be able to defend himself unless the government revealed details about one of the National Security Agency’s telecommunications collection programs. On two other counts, documents the government had claimed were classified have either been shown to be labeled unclassified when Drake accessed them or have since been declassified. Faced with the prospect of trying to convict a man for leaking unclassified information, the government frantically crafted a plea deal in the last days before the case was due to go to trial.

The collapse of the case against Drake may have repercussions beyond just this one case.

This is the third time the government’s attempt to use the Espionage Act to criminalize ordinary leaking has failed in spectacular fashion. The first such example—against Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg—got dismissed when the government’s own spying on Ellsberg was exposed.

Spiegal characterizes this case as “an embarrassing setback for the White House”.  It seems that the candidate that promised translucency is fighting to keep secrets at a pace previously never experienced.  That says a lot given the paranoia of Nixon and the fierce defense of the so-called imperial presidency by the Bush/Cheney administration.

Under Obama, more whistleblowers are being held accountable than in all previous decades. Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the Associated Press that the US government is going after whistleblowers “very, very aggressively.”

Government whistle blowers are supposedly protected by an act of Congress passed in 1989 called The Whistle Blower’s Protection Act. It was designed to encourage government employees to step forward with instances of government abuse that they’ve witnessed. You’ll notice the date roughly corresponds to the time the Iran-Contra situation was fresh.   Since then, the law has been weakened.

“It is no surprise that honest citizens who witness waste, fraud and abuse in national security programs but lack legal protections are silenced or forced to turn to unauthorized methods to expose malfeasance, incompetence or negligence,” Stephen Kohn, the executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center wrote in an op-ed contribution to the New York Times on Monday.

He wrote that Congress and the executive branch would be well advised to follow the example of their predecessors. In fact, the first protective law in the US for “whistleblowers” is almost as old as the country itself — it originated in 1778.

Speigal characterizes the Obama administration as having an active policy of “stonewalling” and “blocking” any avenue that would provide a safe path for federal whistle blowers.

The Obama administration also uses other avenues for stonewalling and blocking. At times, those efforts take on grotesque dimensions, as in the case the Pentagon’s September order to pulp the entire first printing run of “Operation Dark Heart.” The memoir by army officer Anthony Shaffer over his time in the Afghanistan war contained what were alleged to be military secrets. The destruction of the 9,500 books cost taxpayers an estimated $47,300. When the second edition was released, 250 passages were blacked out.

This pressure clashes with the increasing openness of the Internet age. Four decades ago, Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy selected passages from the “Pentagon Papers.” Today, WikiLeaks indiscriminately places tens of thousands of documents on the Web. “It revels in the revelation of ‘secrets’ simply because they are secret,” well-regarded attorney Floyd Abrams, who represented the New York Times in its “Pentagon Papers” case against the government, wrote six months ago in the Wall Street Journal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Moammar Gaddafi Thanks Congressional Republicans

Posted: June 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

John Boehner’s office has received a thank you letter from Colonel Moammar Gaddafi expressing appreciation for to the U.S. Congress for their criticism of President Barack Obama’s Libya policy. Presumably Gaddafi was referring to a resolution introduced by Boehner and passed by the House of Representatives last week.

From The New York Times Caucus Blog:

“I want to express my sincere gratitude for your thoughtful discussion of the issues,” Colonel Qaddafi wrote in the letter, a copy of which was supplied to The New York Times by a person seeking to defend the administration’s policy. “We are confident that history will see the wisdom of your country in debating these issues.”

Colonel Qaddafi did not refer specifically to a resolution passed by the House that rebuked the administration for maintaining an American role in the campaign without the consent of Congress. But he expressed hope that the lawmakers would continue to pressure the administration.

“We are counting on the United States Congress to its continued investigation of military activities of NATO and its allies to confirm what we believe is a clear violation of U.N. Security Council resolution 1973,” Colonel Qaddafi said in the three-page letter, which was not addressed to any particular lawmaker.

The Caucus got a response from John Boehner’s spokesperson:

“If authentic, this incoherent letter only reinforces that Gaddafi must go. There’s no disagreement about that,” said the spokesman for Mr. Boehner, Brendan Buck. “That’s why so many Americans have questions – which the White House refuses to answer – about the administration committing U.S. resources to an operation that doesn’t make his removal a goal.”

Too funny! This is an open thread.

Live Blog: Breitbart hijacks a Weiner Presser

Posted: June 6, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 133 Comments

There’s basically a media circus unfolding on TV right now.  Congressman Weiner was supposed to hold an event this afternoon and Big Media Blowhard Andrew Breitbart showed up at the podium to defend himself against charges of hacking Weiner’s twitter stream.

It looks like Weiner is waiting in the wings.  Breitbart has just left the podium.  Many news outlets are now covering it live but not broadcasting the sound.

What a zoo!!!

Notable Tweets:

 

TheFix The Fix
Holy. Crap. Andrew Breitbart has hijacked the Weiner press conference. This. Is. Amazing.

AmandaMarcotte Amanda Marcotte
Shorter Breitbart: If 5% of what you say is kind of sort of like the truth, then no one can call you a liar again.

cspan CSPAN
WATCH: @RepWeiner Press Conference – LIVE shortly on C-SPAN3 http://cs.pn/C3LIVE

joshtpm Josh Marshall
make that the Breitbart press

Slate Slate
He’s hijacked Weiner’s presser. RT @thefix: CNN is live-streaming the Breitbart presser. You must watch this. http://ow.ly/5bp1W

Thedailybeast The Daily Beast
WATCH: Congressman Anthony Weiner to address his latest Twitter scandal (now hijacked by @andrewbreitbart?!) http://thebea.st/ixpvRL

politico POLITICO
RT @maghabepolitico Tweeps, this is a real Anthony Weiner presser. We were not punked into covering Breitbart http://politi.co/9Ax31v

HuffPostMedia HuffPost Media
by HuffingtonPost
Andrew Breitbart hijacks Anthony Weiner’s press conference, says the press asked him to do so http://huff.to/lMxMVx

MotherJones Mother Jones
Breitbart on Fox News Channel on a radio show explaining why he hijacked a press conference #SUPERmeta

Links:
Rep. Anthony Weiner: ‘The Picture Was of Me and I Sent It’

Late Late Night: Dumbasses of the Week (V.S. Naipaul and Kenneth Del Vecchio)

Posted: June 6, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 14 Comments

This guy:

This past week, the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul was interviewed at the Royal Geographic Society in London about his phenomenal career, which spans six decades. It should have been a glorious moment. Instead, Sir Vidia told an interviewer that no woman could ever be his literary match. Then he singled out Jane Austen and said that he couldn’t possibly “share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world.”

Naipaul also called a book by his former female publisher, “feminine tosh.” And that, he said, is because a woman has a “narrow view of the world, since she is inevitably not a complete master of the house.” This from a man the New York Review of Books called “the greatest living master of English prose.”

His comments somehow reminded me of this guy and this scene:

The real dumbass above went after women authors and the fictional dumbass went after women characters and women readers, but the criticism pretty much seems to boil down to stereotyping all female writers, characters, and readers as irrational, overly emotional, unworldly chick lit lightweights.

On the other hand, Jack Nicholson was playing a misanthropic novelist whose life had been debilitated by obsessive compulsive disorder, whereas V.S. Naipaul is a Nobel laureate who once said of his mistress: “I was very violent with her for two days. I was very violent with her for two days with my hand. My hand began to hurt.”

His poor, poor hand. So burdened doing all those enriching “master of the house” things.

This is the guy who can’t think of any girl writer who is his literary equal? Or…gasp…a girl writer that is better than him?

I’m sorry we can’t all write from the experience of having physically assaulted someone for two days. Our poor little wimmen pea brains and our narrow little existences.

Here’s what I think.

Naipaul needs to go sit in a fetal position and put on some Depends if need be and read Zadie Smith.

As a matter of fact, I just did a cursory search on whether he has and found this from an interview in 2008:

The conversation turns briefly to Zadie Smith. Naipaul has not read White Teeth, but sympathises with the author’s predicament: ‘The problem for someone like that is: where do you go, how do you move? If you’ve consumed your material in your first book, what do you do?’ He shakes his head. ‘All those stages are full of anguish.’

Why hadn’t Naipaul read White Teeth by 2008? That’s pretty ridiculous. It was published in 2000 and was highly acclaimed. I think this is a case of a big ego masking insecurities.

Be sure to check out Diana Abu-Jaber’s open letter to this dumbass — From One Writer To Another: Shut Up, V.S. Naipaul (h/t Ramsgate, over in the comments at my Sat. crosspost at TM’s.) Teaser:

Your use of the word “master,” is chilling. My father’s family is from a part of the world that has been colonized and conquered many times over. For many Jordanians, education and literacy has come in the form of British schools and the English language: but can anyone claim that the colonized subject is the master of his or her own home?

Cujo359, another regular over at TM’s, had this to say about Naipaul:

I’ve never heard of that guy, but I’ve heard of Jane Austen. Just sayin’.

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates urges us–quelle surprise-to not deprive ourselves the genius of Naipaul because of Naipaul’s misogynist (and racist) blinders:

The fact of the thing is this: We don’t get to choose our teachers. If you’re going to be an artist, or a thinker, or even a full person, you better be able to make yourself into something more than the shadow of someone else’s bankrupt philosophies. You better be more than an obvious and predictable reaction.

To which I say, hey Coates, where was this attitude when you went off on Cornel West? Where was the PSA saying “Just ignore Cornel West’s comments about Obama as a black man and learn from what he is saying about Obama being a corporate tool. You don’t get to choose your teachers…” ? Just wondering.

Switching gears…

Here’s another creepy dumbass (h/t Dakinikat) — NJ GOPer Premieres Anti-Abortion Suspense Flick This Weekend:

Kenneth Del Vecchio, a Republican candidate for New Jersey state Senate and a producer of conservative-themed films, is premiering a psychological thriller this weekend with a pro-life twist: Three pregnant women, who intend to have abortions, are kidnapped and forced to carry their pregnancies to term.

The movie, called “The Life Zone,” was produced by Del Vecchio’s “Justice For All Productions,” and is premiering Saturday at the Hoboken Film Festival in Teaneck, N.J. A press release describes the festival as “one of the nation’s largest film festivals, which Del Vecchio founded and chairs.”

From the release:

The controversial premise of THE LIFE ZONE: three women have been kidnapped from abortion clinics and are being held for seven months–until they all give birth. The film, which appears to cut right down the middle, examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist.

Well this looks like as good a spot as any for me to put up some footage from The Last Supper. If you’re unfamiliar with this dark political comedy from the ’90s, it’s about a group of stereotypical bleeding hearts who invite all kinds of rightwing nutjobs to dinner to kill them and rid the world of their evil. Without giving the final scene entirely away, I’ll just say that the message of The Last Supper is that all politically motivated violence is ultimately futile.

Not sure whatever the hell the “anti-abortion climactic twist” is supposed to be with “The Life Zone” (interesting how the title mimics The Last Supper).

Is it that kidnapping women and holding them for seven months to force them to have babies is not a “culture of life” thing to do? Somehow, I’m not convinced.

Anyhow, here’s The Last Supper trailer:

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